Forum Discussion
Do you have Office 365 and want to know when you’ll get Office 2019?
Applies to: Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business, Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal
If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, there is no need to upgrade to Office 2019. Office 365 ProPlus apps already have all the latest features included in Office 2019, and many more.
Office 365 ProPlus is the most productive, most secure and lowest total cost of operation version of Office. Office 2019 is for customers who aren’t ready to move to the cloud yet. Office 2019 doesn’t have cloud-connected intelligent features, such as real-time collaboration, PowerPoint Designer, and Office 365 Groups, that Office 365 ProPlus has. Also, an added benefit of being an Office 365 subscriber is that we release new and updated features on a monthly basis (or an semi-annual basis, if you choose that). Office 2019 won’t receive any new features.
In the past, Office 365 subscribers had to do a manual upgrade to go from Office 2013 to Office 2016. This year, Microsoft delivered on our promise of no more manual upgrades for Office 365 subscribers to get the latest features. What this means for you:
- No big download: There is no big upgrade that will overload your network. Subscribers will continue to receive new features in updates.
- Always up to date: You no longer need to worry about the year in the Office product title. Subscribers on Office 365 will continue to get the latest features in the Office 365 ProPlus apps.
- Settings stay in-place: There is no need to update user settings and policies since we’re not changing the Office version.
- Add-ins remain the same: You don’t need to re-test add-in compatibility since the file locations and registry entries stay the same.
To enable these continuous feature updates for Office 365 subscribers while preserving all your settings and policies, we are keeping the first part of the binary version number the same (16.0). That means that all your settings, policies, and even add-ins aren't affected by any change of version or file locations.
If you’re not yet on Office 365, we have made it easy to upgrade from legacy Office (MSI) versions to newer versions of Office.
For existing subscribers, we’ll continue to release new features to Office 365 ProPlus and it will keep evolving to give you the best Microsoft has to offer.
Thanks--Steve (special thanks to Naomi Harrington, the author of this post)
- This kind of announcements would be better in a blog post than in a forum message...just my 2 cents